A Hole in my Heart

A Hole in My Heart is a film with an exclamation mark. An angry, radical film, in which there is hardly any room for the liberating smile characteristic of Moodysson. For Moodysson, the film is also a return to the basics, after a series of increasingly expensive productions. Moodysson did much of his own camerawork and worked with a very small crew. The claustrophobic setting is an apartment in a Swedish suburb where a father lives with his teenage son. The shy son spends most of his time listening to industrial rock in his locked room. The father spends his time producing digital amateur porn starring himself, his friend Geko and Tess, a young woman who says she has been dreaming of a life in porn since the age of twelve and has used plastic surgery to increase her appeal. Over the course of several days, relations degenerate in the apartment. Moodysson has exploited all his cinematographic talent in a convincing and pessimistic attack on the perverting power of the camera and today’s grotesque pornographic conventions, an attack that seems synecdochically aimed at the whole of western civilisation. ‘I suddenly felt sorry for the fake pussy, it had become like a living thing, it felt like we’d violated it even though it was made of plastic and had been bought for 3000 crowns in a porn shop in Gothenburg,’ according to Moodysson in an interview. (GT)